The PyCon Blog

We're happy to announce the Sponsor Workshop series, taking place on Wednesday April 9 and Thursday April 10, the two days leading up to the conference. In a similar fashion to our tutorials, our sponsors are leading 90 minute sessions on a variety of topics. Oh, and they're free!If you'd like to come to any of the workshops, it would be helpful if you RSVP'ed here. It's not required, but it helps us estimate how much food and drinks we should have for those times. Wednesday - 9:00 AMJohn Wetherill of ActiveState will be introducing Platform-as-a-Service and container technologies, along with how to design and architect applications to take advantage of them. He also covers topics like deployment and migration, and gives examples of monitoring, logging, and debugging cloud-based applications.Wednesday - 3:30 PMJacob Kaplan-Moss introduces Heroku by guiding attendees through the process of deploying and managing applications on the platform. With only a basic knowledge of Python, attendees will leave with an understanding of what it takes to build and deploy applications, monitor and configure them, scale the applications up and down, and get a taste of the Heroku Platform API.Thursday - 9:00 AMJesse Noller will show you what it takes to build scalable applications on the Rackspace Cloud. Built on open source tools, from the OpenStack platform to the SDKs in a variety of languages, the workshop aims to show you how to develop and deploy your own applications on any OpenStack cloud.Thursday - 1:30 PMAndrew Godwin gives an inside look to the Django patterns in use at Eventbrite and Lanyrd to handle massive datasets and millions of visitors. While Django familiarity is helpful, the workshop aims to be useful for developers of other web stacks as well, looking into topics like task queues, database scaling techniques, zero downtime deploys, and more.Thursday - 3:30 PMLed by Wesley Chun, Google engineers from three locations will be splitting up their workshop period into three different talks. Marc Cohen and Brian Dorsey will talk about bringing Python applications into the Google Cloud Platform. Alex Perry will cover both beginner and advanced uses of regular expressions, as well as evaluate the performance characteristics of Python's standard library regular expressions versus those of RE2. Finally, Thomas Wouters covers Python from the maintainer side, covering how Google moved away from platform installations into looking after their own build, and everything that came with.There are also workshops by Basho's Tom Santero, covering how to build applications on Riak, and Graham Dumpleton of New Relic on measuring all the things!